Fourth Amendment isn’t a guideline; it’s the law

FBI agents in Las Vegas suspected that a group of men renting three luxury villas at Caesars Palace were up to no good.

The men had taken a huge cache of electronic equipment into the villas. One recently had been expelled from Macao — a gambling mecca in China comparable to Las Vegas — for running an illegal gambling operation. All the evidence, circumstantial as it was, suggested an illegal online sports-betting business had been set up.

The FBI agents were pretty sure they knew what was going on. The hotel engineers, savvy as they were about the technology of gambling, were pretty sure, too. So was the casino security team.

But this being the United States, where the Fourth Amendment protects citizens against capricious intrusions on our privacy by the state, the FBI agents couldn’t simply march into the villas.

They needed a warrant. But their suspicions did not meet legal standards for obtaining one.

What to do? Well, the agents arranged to have the Internet service to the villas turned off. Then, pretending to be cable-company repairmen, they entered the villas, surreptitiously photographed all the electronic gear and then used that evidence to obtain a warrant and arrest the men.

Defense lawyers for the eight men contend they are eager to go to court to challenge the constitutionality of the FBI ruse. Their enthusiasm appears warranted. There often may be a thin line between legal sting operations and illegal searches and seizures. But, in this case, it looks like the FBI jumped over that line with both feet.

The FBI’s Vegas caper could be chalked up to local overenthusiasm for defending a vital local industry — gambling — against illicit competition.

But the incident didn’t occur in a vacuum. It came to light on the heels of at least two other dodgy federal “sting” operations, including one that included creating a fake “news” story attributed to The Associated Press. The AP complained that the use of its identity in the sting “undermined AP’s credibility.”

Federal disregard for the privacy of its citizens has been getting a great deal of attention of late. But have those revelations changed the behavior of federal snoops? It doesn’t seem so.

The National Security Agency metadata-gathering practices revealed by Edward Snowden embarrassed federal spy agencies. But they have not yet prompted any significant reforms of agency practices.

First Amendment as well as Fourth Amendment issues arise. The Justice Department’s pursuit of government whistle-blowers resulted in a virtual bulldozing of federal restraints on investigating the press. In 2013, Attorney General Eric Holder approved phone taps on 20 AP reporters, including their home phones and the telephones of their parents, as well as an aggressive, round-the-clock monitoring of journalist James Rosen of Fox News.

Holder personally approved an investigation that deemed Rosen an “aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in a criminal scheme to receive secret government information. The government treated him like a spy, not a reporter.

Reporter Sharyl Attkisson depicts chilling evidence in her book “Stonewalled,” that her personal computer and a computer at the offices of her former employer, CBS News, were hacked and compromised by professional hackers using protocols consistent with those used by federal snoops. CBS News in 2013 confirmed that its own investigators found such evidence.

None of this necessarily suggests a government conspiracy to abandon the Constitution. But it certainly suggests that federal agents are seeing the bedrock limitations in a less-deferential light. More what you call guidelines than actual rules.

Thing is, they are actual rules — rules that, we expect, a judge will explain in some detail soon to Justice lawyers in Las Vegas.